Some Classical Economics: Monetary Features of Trade Fluctuations in Ancient Rome

Abstract

Much essential monetary theory is clarified by the ancient skeletal materials. And there is serendipity too. Finley’s (1985) insistence that the imperial economy suffered from a chronic shortage of coin is of a piece with a widespread fallacy about eighteenth-century British North America, shared by Alexander Hamilton in his still admired Bank and Public Debt reports (see Burstein, 1988). Study of the ancient fragments, and their faulty analyses, helps establish that the principles of economics are adequately universal. And there may be an economy for which ‘cash in advance’ is tenable: that of ancient Rome.